‘Limitless’ energy: how floating solar panels near the equator could power future population hotspots::New research shows densely populated countries in Southeast Asia and West Africa could harvest effectively unlimited energy from solar panels floating on calm tropical seas near the equator.
Of course this assumes those waters stay calm. Given how fast ocean and atmospheric currents are changing that does not seem like a safe assumption. Hurricanes are not likely to move into the region but that’s not the only weather that can wreck big plates of brittle silicon.
The same can be said about pretty much every infrastructure project on the planet though. Earthquakes, cyclones, hurricanes, tornados, floods, droughts, etc can all take down power grids of all types.
They all need maintenance, and the benefit of solar is that you can spend more on maintenance because you dont have to pay for incoming energy for processing.
No project is flawless, but maintain a grid of anodes and shooing away birds has definite benefits over digging up coal or uranium, or pumping oil and gas all over the place.
We cant let perfect be the enemy of good.
Just… Freaking… Deploy nuclear plants! We have the tech, we know they work, their footprint is small. Why the frack do we feel the need to chase these ridiculous zany ideas that face obvious fundamental engineering flaws, like, oh I don’t know, STORMS and corrosion??? Maintaining these would be a bloody nightmare.
That’s interesting you say that because building nuclear plants is also a “bloody nightmare”, see Vogtle, Hinkley Point, Flamanville, etc
They have been dumb, that’s for sure. However, a large part of the reason they were dumb is because of the regulatory process being, well … stupid. Not engineered well for actually executing projects. Don’t get me wrong, we absolutely need regulatory oversight, but it can be done in a more thoughtful way than it is currently.
These floating solar panels though, strike me as a general engineering nightmare.
If nuclear was in any way comparable in terms of cost to renewables + storage you might have a point, but it isn’t, so you don’t.
If these are too big then presumably it’ll block sunlight from that patch - that not a bad thing? I assume you’d need a lot for it to have an effect and the sea is pretty big…
I was wondering the same thing. Just considering algae, it absorbs a large portion of the world’s CO2. But the ocean is massive and a relatively tiny covered patch wouldn’t dent it much.
Add the fact that the solar panels would negate some of the need to burn fossil fuels, I think the outcome is more than net positive.
As far as any negative impact on wildlife and the biosphere, I’m sure it’s negative, but I don’t know much about it.
This is fucking stupid imo. We have more than enough land area for solar as it is. Why would you add 100x the complexity to your solar plant when you can just build it on land? Now you have to deal with tides, salt water corrosion, your technicians have to be scuba divers or something, running transmission lines through salt water is much harder than the ground. What happens when there’s an electrical fault that kills a bunch of people because they’re submerged in highly conductive salt water?
If you had read even the first sentence of the article, you might’ve learned that just maybe they have a reason to not use land.
Not enough land.
Not every place is like central Africa or Ohio. Basically all coastal regions near the equator (which are the only places they are recommending this) are densely populated. To get the amount of solar panels they suggest, you would have to go far inland (if there is any inland) and have many more much smaller solar plants, and that’s more maintenance than single giant solar field, though as you’ve said, I’m sure on the sea comes with it’s own maintenance problems.
The article also talks about waves, wind and other environmental affects, and shows all the places where the “defences” against the environment wouldn’t have to be strong or expensive.
They most definitely don’t suggest that this be used everywhere. The main example they talked about is Indonesia. Extremely densely populated with little suitable land for solar plants.
TLDR: In most places this is stupid… but they never suggested that. There are certain places where it is viable and possibly the only option for large solar farms.
That’s an interesting question. I don’t have a lot of expertise on this topic, but my understanding is that tropical seas have some areas around reefs that are teeming with life and others that are relatively barren? So choosing a barren patch would seem the sensible option.
But I wonder. Even along reefs, there is this unfolding crisis of coral bleaching driven at least in part by global warming. Could a limited number of panels deployed in a loose fashion provide some shade and keep coastal waters cooler? Could this actually be beneficial to equatorial corals if done with care? There are a lot of assumptions here, though, and I wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions.
If you look at the coral reef map, you can see that a huge portion of the sea in SEA is pretty barren.
Most of the sea in those region is pretty barren with mud/sand sea floor. As long as they don’t put it above a coral reef I imagine the ecological impact would be small. Might even have a positive impact because it might provide shelter for young fish in an otherwise barren patch of sea.
Anytime one of these big projects has something offshore, I have to wonder whether it wouldn’t be more likely to be adopted if it were on land instead, if possible. Everything. EVERYTHING is more expensive when you’re putting it in the middle of miles of salt water.
Removed by mod
